Let's say you're working on a project, and it's the worst experience of your life. The only silver lining is your name not being attached to the thing. Wouldn't you want to stick it to your bosses and be sneakily subversive? Of course you would. And as it turns out, you're not the first person with that impulse. It only takes the slightest offense for creative types to turn paranoid, vindictive, and spiteful — and history is full of examples.

I'll Tell You Where You Can Stick That

Occasionally, despite all efforts to avoid it, artists are met with approval, commended, even nominated for a totally pointless prize. And sometimes, when they win, they make a show of condemning the instinct for self-congratulation. Austrian cynic Thomas Bernhard always delivered cutting acceptance speeches, now collected in a vicious book. A year after publishing an attack on award culture, author Julien Gracq refused the Prix Goncourt altogether, as Sartre would his Nobel Prize in 1964. David Bowie, meanwhile, even turned down British knighthood, saying, "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for."

The Dazzling Career of Alan Smithee

The tradition of a movie director amending his or her credit to read "Alan Smithee" when they wanted to disown a project was formally discontinued in 2000, with Kiefer Sutherland's Woman Wantedslipping just under the wire, thank god. What's so deliciously nasty about the practice is that once a film was on a path toward awfulness, a director could shoot the moon and get paid for making the deleriously terrible film — and then save his reputation by using an absurd moniker. The producers and actors rarely had such an easy out. The convention should be resurrected simply because it gave us the most delightful page on all of IMDb — a filmography so wretched you kind of want to marathon-watch every title in order. To think thatHellraiser: Bloodline, the edited-for-TV version of Dune, and a last-season episode of The Cosby Showwere all the work of one demented man is an illusion far too good to give up.

Remembering Mandela — With a Rabbit?

Last month, sculptors Andre Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren were rushed through a job constructing a memorial for the late Nelson Mandela. It
was almost 30 feet tall and made of bronze. When the sculptors were
informed they wouldn't get to sign it, they did what any good artists
would: they got revenge. It took weeks before anyone noticed their small,
sardonic gesture — a bronze rabbit hiding deep in Mandela's right ear.
It was an anonymous autograph of sorts, and also a rebuke, as "haas" means both "rabbit" and "haste" in Afrikaans. "We don't think it's appropriate because Nelson Mandela never had a rabbit on his ear," said Mogomotsi Mogodiri,
spokesman for South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture, who
insisted that Prinsloo and van Vuuren had never asked about engraving
their names on the statue.

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So you see, artists have been devious and manipulative for centuries. Though, when you get right down to it, is there any artistic decision not somehow based on spite?

Miles Klee is a reporter for The Daily Dot and author of the novel Ivyland,
a finalist in the 2013 Tournament of Books. His work has appeared in
Vanity Fair, Lapham's Quarterly, BlackBook, The Awl, Salon, The Village
Voice, The New York Observer and elsewhere.